


Time Marches On

by Oneinamaximillion



Category: No Straight Roads (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:53:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27343075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oneinamaximillion/pseuds/Oneinamaximillion
Summary: Tatiana goes home, goes to sleep, dreams, wakes up, and contemplates the future. In that order.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 35





	Time Marches On

**Author's Note:**

> enjoy!

Tatiana goes home and tries not to think.

It’s been...a long few days.

The stress of losing her districts, overexerting her powers, the appearance of, ugh, _Kliff_ , and to top it all off the desperate scramble to stop a _fucking satellite_ from crashing into her city-

It’s over now.

First order of business: shower. Get the confetti-like satellite scraps off her skin. She’s mostly cooled off by now, but the water still hisses and steams when it hits the now active lines running across the edge of her face. She winces at a feeling both foreign and familiar; she’s gotten used to a form made of ash.

She blinks and finds herself standing in her room.

Song of the Muses, she must be really out of it. She forcibly dials herself back in order to return to the shower, so she can actually experience it instead of having a vague half-real memory of having done it. Her powers shakily obey, briefly sending her to the living room coated in scrap again before returning her personal timeline back to the present.

She so rarely uses her abilities, both with regards to time and to fire. She had felt very little need to demonstrate her strength as head of NSR beyond a few well-placed speeches. Few people even knew what she was capable of. But perhaps today was proof that she needed to get back into practice. Neon J would probably be willing to spar with her; if she remembered correctly (and she almost always did), he had some experience with sword fighting.

That was a problem for distant-future Tatiana. For now she changes into a set of pajamas, wolfs down some leftovers, and turns in for the night.

_She dreams of a city deep underground, where the very heartbeat of the earth could be heard. She dreams of her family, of huge crystal structures, of splashing magma at her younger siblings and visiting the surface whenever she got the chance. That was several lifetimes ago._

_She dreams of former friends: one from her hometown, one from their sister-city on the surface, one met on the road. Of starting a band just-for-fun, and not knowing what to do with their sudden popularity. Of concerts growing bigger and wilder until people started getting hurt. Of her failure to keep her friends together, her inability to mediate conflict to the point that the group just...fell apart at the seams._

_She dreams of Vinyl City, **her** city, and how much of a mess it was when she took over. And, if she’s being honest with herself...how much of a mess it is now. She’s not sure where she lost her way, but somewhere along the line she started focusing less on the city and more on her company. And her city was drowning, and it was burning, it was blind in the dark and raining soot from the sky and dripping hate in the form of spray paint on the walls and why couldn’t she keep it together, this was her responsibility she just had to fix it just had to keep the peace, keep **order** -_

She wakes up to sunlight reaching halfway across her bedroom floor. She can’t remember the last time she slept in like this.

(She can. It was back during her tour days, when nothing mattered and her actions carried no consequences and everybody loved her).

She gets up and gets dressed and makes coffee and waters the plants on the windowsill. One of them has started wilting for reasons she can’t determine. After a moment’s hesitation, she carefully reaches out and rewinds it back to a point of health. Hopefully she can figure out what caused its damage and prevent it before it happens again this time.

She retrieves a tablet and looks over what her schedule was _supposed_ to be today as she eats breakfast. A meeting with the press that was now essential for entirely different reasons, reviewing the budget, going over project suggestions from the other artists...at least some of these could wait while she focused on the more pressing matter of rebuilding the city. Her artists would definitely be chomping at the bit to fix up their districts. She was especially concerned about Cast Tech; having been unsupervised the longest, it had undoubtedly suffered the most damage.

And, of course, the incorporation of more independent artists of genres besides EDM. Despite her initial resistance to the idea, her brain is now rapidly cycling through potential strategies. Allowing bands to play at smaller venues like cafes, to power a few city blocks; organized community gatherings where neighbors could come together to boost their local grid; finding technicians to rework qwasa efficiency and reroute power to be more fairly distributed. Maybe investing in some sort of energy storage system to reduce the frequency and length of blackouts. She took notes on her thoughts and decided to propose them to the rest of the council tomorrow.

Maybe reaching out to the city as a whole wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. Holding some sort of conference or setting up a complaint system so her citizens could bring their problems to her _before_ they resorted to revolution.

There’s too much damage to be repaired and too many mistakes to be forgiven and too much work to do to alone. But time marches on, and as long as she’s alive, so will Tatiana.

**Author's Note:**

> i debated posting this because nothing really...happens, but then i decided 'fuck it' so here it is. Must a work have plot? is it not enough for me to simply ramble about some headcanons? anyway i'm obsessed with this game and will probably write more in the future. or college will kill me and i'll disappear for months again.


End file.
